December 7, 2016 AT 5:00 pm

LED Isis Wings How-To

Glowing wings are appropriate for many costumes and occasions. Fairy costumes, video game costumes, original designs — I could keep going. Instructables user ks51 recently spent a solid week working on making a pair of LED isis wings. She loves props that incorporate LEDs and she put a lot of time into these wings (and still is, actually). The supplies are extensive and including Flora Neopixels, an Arduino Uno, and several other electronics you can find here at Adafruit. She began by prepping the Neopixels:

First of all, you’ll want to break the Neopixel lights off of their boards. Be sure to but them back in their bag and don’t leave them laying around. They are fairly small and it’s very easy to misplace a few of them.

Once all of your lights are free, you can spread out the wings and begin placing the lights where you want them (be sure to keep count as you place them so that you know how many you’ll need to complete the project.

Take your wire and begin measuring and cutting pieces off so that the pieces are long enough to reach from one light to the next one (be sure to measure an extra inch or so for soldering purposes).

After you have plenty of wiring cut out, the soldering can begin. Pigtail the wires for the positive and negative joints. Connect the positive side of each light to the positive side of the lights beside it. Do the same for the negative side. Be sure that the arrows are all connecting in the same direction as the wires that connect to the arrows control your data flow. You will need two strands of lights, one that holds 33 Neopixels while the other holds 34 Neopixels.

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.